More and more young people come to the emergency room who have gone overboard with energy drinks. They drink to stay awake during lessons or gain an extra boost of energy before a match or event.
Emily Marchant, Red Bull in hand, works intently in the Harper College reading room. She has been an admirer of this drink for a long time. When he needs to strengthen himself, he drinks a can. But he also knows what it means to overdose. Two years ago, at a pub party to drive her friends home, she absentmindedly drank four drinks. After that, for hours, she couldn’t help but tremble. Marchant, 21, from Illinois, has finally recovered, but some energy drink lovers have not been so lucky. According to a federal report, the number of patients reporting to ER after overusing this type of drink has increased tenfold in the US compared to 2005. Many of these visits are the result of mixing energy workers with alcohol or drugs, but 56 percent patients are young people who have simply abused the drug itself.
The report, released in November by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, is another critical argument against the multi-billion dollar and rapidly growing energy drink market. Many researchers and doctors warn that energy containing large amounts of caffeine is harmful, especially for young people.
“Children with palpitations, dizziness, headaches, nausea and complaints of fatigue come to us,” says Dr. Todd Zimmerman of the Alexian Brothers Health System. – And then in the interview it comes out that they drink from 8 to 12 such drinks a day.
The American Beverage Manufacturers Association (ABA) accuses the authors of the report of omitting information on the general health of beverage consumers, adding that just over 13. the 2009 cases described in the report account for only a small percentage of 123 million emergency room visits per year. The association also points out that most energy drinks contain half as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. However, researchers compare them to soft drinks, which are much more popular among teenagers than coffee. A report published this year in the journal Pediatrics indicates that energy drinks contain three times more caffeine than cola, not to mention the high dose of caffeine in additives such as guarana, yerba mate and cocoa. The authors warn that these drinks “may have a detrimental effect on children’s health.”
The ABA emphasizes that energy drinks are not intended for young consumers, but Zimmerman says pediatric emergency rooms at St. Alexius and Alexian Brothers receive at least two young patients a week with symptoms indicating the abuse of “energy”. In his opinion, such drinks regularly help teenagers, convinced that they need an additional dose of energy.
“They give a lot of different reasons: that they need energy before the game and at school to stay awake in class,” he explains. – Quite recently, teenagers who drink these drinks have started to appear, because they say they suppress the appetite. This is a particularly dangerous argument.
Art Kubic, a pharmacist at the Illinois Poison Center, calculated that 60 out of 81 of the cases studied by the center were related to energy drinks. Overdosing on caffeine, he says, can cause a lot of unpleasant symptoms. – If the patient feels nauseous and vomits, we advise you to stop taking caffeine and other stimulants, as well as nasal drops, and report for a checkup in a few hours. If more disturbing symptoms appear: palpitations, recurrent vomiting, increased heart rate, we send the patient to the hospital.
The vast majority of cases experienced by Dr. Tom Scaletta, medical director of the emergency room at Edward Hospital in Naperville, Illinois, are young people mixing energy drinks with alcohol. “They usually think that this way they will be able to drink more alcohol thanks to the energy boost provided by caffeine,” he explains. “But they quickly get to a much more dangerous level – the amount of alcohol they have consumed makes the drinks unable to wake them up.” A federal survey found that 44 percent. emergency cases are patients who have confused “energy” with alcohol, drugs or drugs. Men tend to combine energy drinks with alcohol and drugs, and women tend to fortify them with drugs. According to psychiatrists at Johns Hopkins University, the government should tighten regulations on the consumption of energy drinks, because relatively high levels of caffeine can harm “young and inexperienced” consumers.
Daniel Evatt from Johns Hopkins University, who studies caffeine addiction, believes that cans and bottles should be properly warned, especially since for some time advertising campaigns – using snapshots from BMX racing or other extreme sports – are directed almost exclusively to young people who may have a low tolerance to caffeine.
The turbulent career of caffeine
A few years ago, when Alex Smyth, a student at the Illinois Art Institute, was passionately playing video games, caffeine was the fuel that made all-night console sessions possible. He consumed more than a dozen drinks a day and, as he claims, never experienced any side effects. “I love caffeine,” says 21-year-old Smyth, who recently switched to coffee. – It makes me feel alive. He is not alone in his adoration of the world’s most beloved stimulant: according to some researchers, only in North America up to 90 percent. adults consume caffeine regularly. And yet, for centuries, voices about the dangers of consuming caffeine keep returning from time to time. Let’s take coffee, the most popular source of caffeine. According to the book “Coffee: A Dark History” by the coffee dealer and historian Antony Wild, the black drink was drunk by Yemeni Sufis, a mystical branch of Islam, as early as in the XNUMXth century. Coffee allowed the dervishes to participate in exhausting all-night rituals.
When the drink reached Mecca in 1511, it began to arouse suspicion. After a long debate on the spiritual purity of coffee, the city’s ruler Emir Kahir Bey banned its consumption. The decree did not last long. When the coffee-loving Ottoman empire conquered the region in 1517, Wild writes, two doctors who backed the ban had their hands chopped off. Even in the Middle East there has never been a shortage of coffee critics. With time, concerns also reached Europe, where coffee has reigned since the 1674th century. In his book “Uncommon Grounds” on the history of coffee, its author Mark Pendergrast writes that in XNUMX a group of English women published a manifesto against “the abuse of this newfangled, nasty, pagan drink called coffee, which robs our husbands of masculinity and ruins even the most courageous.”
The campaign intensified in the 1911th century, when the food industry began to add caffeine to non-alcoholic beverages. In XNUMX, the federal government sued Coca-Cola for selling drinks containing this allegedly harmful ingredient. Ludy Benjamin, who reported on the trial for the American Association, wrote that the company lost the case, but was not forced to withdraw caffeine from its product.
In 1980, the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) became interested in caffeine, which initially recommended that it be eliminated from non-alcoholic beverages. Beverage makers protested that caffeine was a “flavor enhancer” and as such should be allowed. The agency finally gave in. “If caffeine were not considered a flavor enhancer and treated as a psychoactive agent, the FDA would have to treat soft drinks as drugs,” three Johns Hopkins University researchers wrote in a 2009 report summarizing the long-standing controversy.